Underestimate Testing At Your Peril! Here’s Why QA Is Essential

If you’re looking to get into software development, then you may be tempted to pay less attention to testing than you should. We’re going to have a look at why testing is so important in this field.

Finding defects and errors

This, of course, is the most obvious reason you need to be testing your products. If your software isn’t working the way you want it to work, then you’re basically failing in your objectives! This is going to affect a lot of things, and we’re going to look into them as we go forward.

Customers care a lot about quality. And if you don’t deliver it to them, your reputation is going to suffer. The last thing any business needs is a bad reputation. Don’t be tempted to deliver software that hasn’t been tested properly just to meet a deadline. Delivering something late but functioning is a lot better than delivering something broken on time.

Edge cases

So you know what you expect the user to do, right? But the behavior of someone using your product isn’t always going to be predictable. The defects present in the program may not make themselves evident in regular use. It’s possible that there are devastating errors within the code that may not be found for months after release. This is why you need testing to be extremely exhaustive. Testing tools are a good way to help accomplish this. Check out some tools at https://www.qasymphony.com/blog/100-plus-best-software-testing-tools/.

When you release software on certain platforms, there are going to be standards you have to meet. These will be enforced either by platform distributors or web hosts. If you’re selling the product, then you’ve got to think about the laws protecting customers. If your product isn’t fit for purpose, then you’ll probably be obliged to refund the customer. If you have a problem with that, you may get into some legal trouble! Read more about consumer rights at http://consumer.laws.com/consumer-rights.

The longer the development cycle, the more money you spend. The more bugs you create, the longer the development cycle. If defects are found after release, then you may have to recall the product and put in unexpected hours. Ultimately, thorough and timely testing is going to save you money. Read more about reducing business costs at http://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/.

Stress testing

Sure, it works when one person is using it. You might already know that it works when two or three people are using it. But if you’ve got a collaborative piece of software, then you need to know what happens when a lot of people use it. This is called stress testing. It can be done with a lot of testers or it can be simulated. Either way, you’ve got to know how the program behaves when hundreds of people use it.

Testing can also be really great for creativity. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that testing should only be performed when the software has finished development. But testing should be ongoing throughout development. Testing may help you brainstorm new features, or show you the way to improve current features even further. Read more about creativity in software development at https://michaellant.com/2010/10/25/software-development-and-creativity/.